Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Putting tomorrow's envelope beside your keys only works if the keys are the only other thing there. On a counter covered in post, the envelope just becomes part of the pile.
So the placing is half the job and the clearing is the other half. Choose one surface that stays bare: a spot by the door, the passenger seat, the top of your shoes. Whatever lives there is going out with you. When two or three other things start collecting on it, that spot has stopped working and needs emptying rather than a new rule written for it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Joseph tells them, 'You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap' (Quran 12:47). Setting something aside now for a day you cannot feel yet is old advice.
قَالَ تَزۡرَعُونَ سَبۡعَ سِنِينَ دَأَبࣰ ا فَمَا حَصَدتُّمۡ فَذَرُوهُ فِي سُنۢبُلِهِۦٓ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تَأۡكُلُونَ
then I can return to the people to inform them.’ Joseph said, ‘You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat
Qur’an 12:47read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised experiment, imagining concrete future events during choices between sooner and later rewards reduced impulsive discounting in both lean and obese adults. That work is about imagining rather than about where you leave an envelope, so the link here is indirect. What carries over is the move of making tomorrow's moment concrete and present instead of abstract.
Daniel TO, Stanton CM, Epstein LH. (2013). The future is now: comparing the effect of episodic future thinking on impulsivity in lean and obese individuals.. Appetite doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A cue you have stopped seeing is the same as no cue at all.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If the only real deadline is the fortnightly meeting, invent some smaller ones. A couple of short catch-ups a week will do more for the work than the formal review ever does.
Building a consequence on purpose beats waiting for life to hand you one. There is nothing more virtuous about the natural version. It just tends to arrive too late to teach anybody anything.
You are allowed to build the consequence rather than waiting for life to deliver one. Waiting is not more honest, it is only slower, and often it never arrives at all.